Iowa State: “The Best Mistake I Ever Made”

In retrospect, Laura Yeager Dolan recalls that she did not really intend to go to Iowa State. But in 1986, she was among the students who enrolled in the program for a master’s degree in English at Iowa State. She was given the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship, a full scholarship and $5,400 stipend to survive on for the entire school year. She came here to study creative writing, graduating in 1988 well prepared for her future career. Although studying creative writing was in her plans, she came to Iowa State by accident.

Dolan was looking to join the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—in Dolan’s words, “the super famous creative writing school”—and earn her MFA where she would have the benefits of the workshop. As she was deciding where to send her test results as part of the application, she recalls asking her mother, “Where’s the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Is it in Ames or Iowa City?” Her mother replied, incorrectly, “Ames.” Before Dolan could recognize or correct her mistake, she received the news that she had been offered a scholarship at Iowa State, and the rest is history.

While at Iowa State, Dolan met, worked with, and learned under the accomplished novelist and English professor Jane Smiley, as well as professors John Hagge and Charlie Kostelnick, who is still at Iowa State. Dolan claims that, during her time as a graduate assistant, these faculty helped her realize her skill for teaching English Composition, which she is applying at Kent State University, where she teaches the fundamentals of writing to first-year students.

In addition to her 35-year career teaching first-year students, Dolan has kept up with her passion for creative writing by teaching online classes for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City, reaching creative writing students “all over the world.” She also writes blog posts monthly for curetoday.com, a forum advocating for and educating about cancer research, and has written a nonfiction story for Guideposts’s Too Amazing for Coincidence, a collection of improbable and amazing true stories. Dolan, who is also in the process of writing a children’s novel, expresses her desire to “keep exploring and living life, learning and teaching and writing and living and loving.”

Despite all that, Dolan says she misses Ames. She said that Iowa State’s campus is beautiful and that a store in the North Grand Mall (likely Flame and Skewer, which is still there today) had the best gyros she’s ever tasted. When asked what she wanted us to put in the article, she only wanted to say, “Thank you for everything.”